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Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Life of a secondary school student: exams, fees and a whole lot more

Imagine being a Ugandan teenager. Not the teenagers you see digging the fields,
sifting rubbish on the garbage tips or selling mugs of peas at the traffic junctions.
No, the teenagers who were lucky enough to be among the 25% who got into secondary
school and are now among the resilient 14% who have managed to scrape together their fees and stick it out for four years. What's it like to be on the
final straight: the dash for ‘O’ Level?

'I [Paul] often lacked
school fees and often dug in order to stay in school. I replaced the lost time
by reading overnight…worse, I got into a coma because of severe malaria and did
not read or attend school for one month.' (all quotations are from The Daily
Monitor, New Vision or The Observer.)

You get up at five o’clock in the morning in your boarding
hostel and do a couple of hours of study before breakfast. You then work all day in
your classes and do prep until 10 o’clock at night. That is your life.

‘I owe my success to…my
brother who was always waking me up to read.’

Sofiya Nakatwanyi lost
all her belongings, including textbooks, while in senior three, when a fire
gutted her dormitory at Mbale-based Hamdan Girls High School in 2010. However,
with God’s help, Nakatwanyi recovered from the tragedy and worked harder.

Crowded illegal boarding hostel.

And if your parents cannot afford the boarding fees, your
day will be just as long but with the addition of an hour or two of travel,
usually on foot, followed by homework, probably by the light of a paraffin
lamp.

The constant power
black outs…did not hinder Lawrence Senoga….’There was a point in my life where
I had to use a phone to read at night,’ [he] said. Also a day scholar he
trekked long hours in the day just to get to school. He pays tribute to his
parents….a security guard and a small scale business woman respectively who
have struggled to raise fees for him, often getting loans.

Ugandan ‘O ’Level students work hard. Any success they
achieve, they have more than earned. Some lose weeks of classes as their parents
can’t afford the fees and they are locked out of school until they come back
with them – or don’t return at all. Some work in any ‘spare’ time they have, earning the fees themselves. Secondary school fees place an enormous strain on
families, with even middle-class parents such as doctors taking two jobs in
order to afford them. As many Ugandan families pay fees for the extended
family, the strain is considerable. Thank goodness for sponsors, gratitude to
whom was expressed by student after student. And, of course, as elsewhere in
the world, some students have none of these challenges as they are among the
privileged – in Uganda, the very privileged few.

Studying in the shade of the (donated) water harvesting tank

Why so much studying? Ugandan secondary students are among the
most tested youngsters in the world: tests every week, tests every month, end
of term tests, end of year tests. As a result, tests take up more than a third
of teaching time, drastically cutting down the time for learning. They are so
busy being tested they don’t have time to learn anything, hence the ridiculous
amounts of homework and the weekend and holiday classes. They certainly don’t
have time for field study, practical projects or research.

Musiime said his
challenge was the geography exam on field work about a farm and a fish landing
site which they had not visited.

Head boy and senior pupils.

The long hours are illegal (official hours are 8am until
5pm), as are the weekend and holiday classes. Students don’t have a choice, however,
and if they complain, they’ll be turned out of school. Every so often, the pressure
builds up, the gasket bursts and all their resentments about inadequate food,
filthy latrines and overcrowded dormitories explode. The result? School
strikes, intervention by armed police and, all too often, tragedy.

The UNEB Secretary…appealed
to [the] Minister of Education and Sports….to find a solution to rampant
cramming among students, saying [they] are not learning but are instead
studying to pass examinations.

However, February is not the time to bewail those who fall
by the wayside; it is the time to celebrate the successes of those who made it. These young people have
jolly well earned their ‘O’ Level certificates!

So, what’s the score now the results are out?

‘O’ Level highlights

Performance overall improved by 2.3%, following
a decline related to the introduction of Universal Secondary Education (USE).

8.5% achieved Division 1, 18.3% Division 2 and
25.5% Division 3.

The failure rate went down from 6.4% to 4.2%.

The number of pupils sitting ‘O’ Level increased
by 8,435 (though this is still well below the number of pupils added to the
pupil population every year.)

The number of female candidates was the highest
ever: 46.5% of the total number.

Girls did better than boys in English Language
and Literature.

Out of the 273,363 candidates, 100 had special
needs. Of these, 40 were blind, 49 were deaf and 11 had ‘impaired ability to
read’ (presumably dyslexic). They all achieved Division 2, whereas in 2010,
43.5% got Grade 4 while 4.2% failed completely.

Following the introduction of USE, the government has recruited
1,400 new teachers, built 4,297new classrooms and refurbished 1,864 others, to improve
the pupil-teacher ratio. (Employing more teachers is of no use unless they have
classrooms to teach in.) It has improved sanitation and water supply, and built
multi-purpose science rooms and libraries as well as increasing the supply of
science kits.

However, there the positives stop.

‘O’ Level lowlights

1. Three quarters of candidates
failed chemistry and biology.

The reasons?

Candidates hadn't covered the syllabus.

Most had had as good as no experience of
carrying out practical experiments.

In fact, the very first time many students carried out a
practical was for the exam. Students did not know how handle the apparatus or
record the data. The government has been rolling out a building programme to
provide government-aided schools with laboratories and stock them with
equipment and chemicals. Nevertheless, even those government schools which do
have labs are said to use them rarely, if at all. Very few private schools have labs, except
the elite establishments, and many with labs do not have any equipment. There
is also said to be a shortage of science teachers.

From the time Renne
Manake set foot in St Lawrence Citizens High School [an elite establishment] all
the way from Kenya, she knew the quiet environment and good facilities like
science and computer laboratories would act as a stimulus for success.

The Education Minister is justifiably very angry about poor
performance in science.

2. Selective education is exclusive

The key measure of performance is the percentage of Division
1 passes each school achieves.

2,314 schools presented pupils for ‘O’ Level.

Of these, only 70 schools were successful in
getting 50% or more of their pupils through the exams with awards at Division 1.

In 214 schools only 1% of pupils achieved
Division 1.

In 630 schools not one single pupil achieved a
pass at Division 1.

Entry to secondary school is selective. It is therefore hardly
surprising that schools which restrict entry in S1 to those with aggregates of
4 and 5 at PLE do better at ‘O’ Level than those which accept pupils with
aggregates of 15 and 16, or 27 and 28. Nevertheless, the media insists on publishing
lists of the ‘top schools’ as if these were roll calls of excellence. No doubt
many of these elite establishments do provide a more conducive educational
environment, are able to employ and pay better teachers and are allowed to keep
out poor children who have struggled through major difficulties and who might
need support. However, every educationalist knows that academic potential bears
no relationship to social class or the ability to pay.

3. It matters where you live

Pupils in the rural areas, particularly the
north and east, did worse than those in central region and the towns in the west.
Exceptions were the two new districts of Butambala and Otuke around 18% of
whose pupils gained Division 1.

Although Kampala, Mukono and Wakiso (central
region) registered top performances, they also had the highest number of
no-shows for the exams. (My personal guess is that some students may have been
encouraged to stay away)

Despite Kampala emerging as the district with
the best performing schools, it also had the worst performing. Over 60 schools
did not register a single student in Division 1.

Pressure on school places in the capital means that private
schools are mushrooming, many of them unregistered and with very poor
educational standards.

4. It’s not great being a girl

The number of candidates who didn’t turn up for
the exams had increased from 4,848 to 6,339. Officials put absenteeism down to ‘early
marriages and illiterate parents who do not value education.’

Girls did worse than boys at science (and maths,
and social subjects, and everything else…except English).

10.2% of boys gained Division 1 compared to 6.6%
of girls.

47.4% of girls gained Division 4 compared with
39.9% of boys.

The Daily Monitor claims that single-sex schools did better
than mixed ones. Twenty out of the 30 top performing schools were single sex.
However, that may simply be because no overcrowded USE schools are single sex while
the selective elite establishments reflect their often colonial or missionary
origins.

5. It gets worse

One of the worst announcements this week was the publication of a study by
Makerere University School of Public Health, funded by the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The study found that in Kampala 21% of female secondary school
students between the ages of 14 and 17 have engaged in ‘transactional sex’ – providing
sex in exchange for something, usually money. One in twenty has had sex with a
relative for this purpose.

First-time sex for most happened when they were between 10
and 14, with 15% doing it for money and 12.3% being raped. One in five had
conceived, with 21% of these having aborted and 16% miscarried.

Of the 54 schools sampled, 40 (74%) were private
non-denominational, seven were government-owned, six were Christian-based and
one was a Muslim school. All were mixed schools, while 61% of them operated
both boarding and day sections.

‘Some children are raped from [in] their homes and
intimidated into silence for fear of the parent’s refusal to pay school fees,’
said the deputy head of Kitebi Secondary School.

It’s those school fees again.

The depute wished the survey had included S1 and S2
students, who were particularly likely to be victims. Last year a report called
Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in Uganda showed that more than 500
children below the age of 18 had engaged in commercial sex both in and out of
school in Kawempe Division of Kampala alone. It pointed out that entry into the
sex trade is getting earlier. The trade includes children of eight to 13 whom
middle-aged men find particularly attractive as they charge lower prices and
are assumed to be free of HIV/Aids.

However, it’s their older sisters we are most concerned
about in this post. The stresses of secondary school life are bad enough
without the need to go into prostitution to pay your school fees.